The Importance of Social Status in Science

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In a sense, I also see social status as being connected to this. Like for example, if someone is wrong in public, they may be really resistant to kind of admitting they were wrong or backing down from what they've said publicly. It's also something that our primitive minds are terrified of. The worst thing, you know, is being publicly shamed, publicly embarrassed, publicly criticized and widely criticized. So yeah, I think there can any kind of motivation, but especially these things that really tap into our very, very primitive kind of mentality.

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What's wrong with society? And what can we do to fix it? Centuries ago, a person's grandparents lived in a world that was basically identical to that person's world; but what are the implications of living in a time when the rate of technological change is such that our grandparents' world was almost nothing like ours, and ours will be almost nothing like our grandchildren's? How do Tim's concepts of the "primitive mind" and the "higher mind" map onto System 1 and System 2 thinking types? What thinking styles exist along the spectrum from primitive mind to higher mind? Why are there either lots of Nazis or virtually none at all? Are there more "golems" or "genies" in the world right now? Are the American political left and right wings just equal but opposite groups, or are there significant asymmetries between them? How does social justice activism differ from "wokeness"? What is "idea supremacy"? Does liberalism need to be destroyed and rebuilt from scratch (perhaps as something else entirely) or merely repaired and revamped? Is illiberalism the biggest threat facing the world right now — bigger even than AI, climate change, etc.?

Tim Urban is the writer/illustrator and co-founder of Wait But Why, a long-form, stick-figure-illustrated website with over 600,000 subscribers and a monthly average of half a million visitors. He has produced dozens of viral articles on a wide range of topics, from artificial intelligence to social anxiety to humans becoming a multi-planetary species. Tim's 2016 TED main stage talk is the third most-watched TED talk in history with 67 million views. In 2023, Tim published his bestselling book What's Our Problem? A Self Help Book for Societies.

Staff